“The entire Front Range was nervous about the rain and the weather was making people do strange things.”
—excerpt from One of Our Own
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This week has burst forth—April at last! I am thrilled that the mornings are full of the cacophony of birdsong and down in Boulder, at least, new green shows itself each day. Soon, spring snow will give way to spring rain. More green will appear.
The landscape is transforming.
But landscape can transform, too: It shapes those of us who pay attention, who try to live deeply with its rhythms. But sometimes catastrophic events cause us to shapeshift so much we might not recognize ourselves. These events remind us of the power of the elemental forces of nature.
This week, I offer an excerpt from my story, One of Our Own, published on Terrain.org about one of these elemental forces—water—and how the natural terrain and the terrain of community shifted in a small mountain town on the Front Range of Colorado during a 1000-year flood event.
This story is based on true events. Click here to read the full story.
One of Our Own
. . . Just after midnight, on what should have been the beginning of a glorious late summer Thursday, on the day we’d planned an end of the season picnic dinner in the Little Park with acoustic music, a slab of Porphyry Mountain calved, loosening with the weight of all that water. It sloughed down toward town, sliding easily along fire-ravaged slopes. The piece of mountain roared as it raced, gathering rocks and mud and trees, and slammed into Floyd’s house with the force of a semi-truck doing eighty, shoving the whole structure forward four feet off its foundation as debris filled the back of Floyd’s house where Floyd lay in his bed.
No sandbags had been placed.
No sirens sounded.
The whole town slept.
The logic of water is down down down and down it all went; the mountain was a river now, a cement-like concoction of everything it had passed over. It filled Bachelor’s Gulch and surged through and around Floyd’s to cross Main Street and merge with Piney Creek just west of the Little Park and the Post Office, effectively slicing the town into upper and lower halves and nearly shoving Lulu’s house into the creek.
The living room around Adam exploded, and for a moment he couldn’t see a thing, but he was being pulled toward the front of the house by a riptide of water and mud. He had the feeling he got on the beach when the water goes out and the sand beneath his feet began to fall away, the ground trickling from beneath him. Everything was night and oozing earth and water. The wall in front of Floyd’s room was bowed out like the hull of ship.
“Floyd,” he called as he half-lunged, half-crawled toward the bedroom door.
It was cemented into place by whatever was on the other side.
The house moaned and lurched again. He heard timbers crack.
Adam did not remember how he got out—A window? Did he push out the screen? But when he emerged, he was more earth than man. He’d lost his shirt and shoes, but he still held his paintbrush in his hand. Water and mud and rocks were everywhere. The road in front of the house had disappeared.
He plunged toward Lulu’s blue house, thrust in part by water.
“Call 911,” he shouted, pounding on the door, “Call 911! I can’t get Floyd.”
By then it was already too late.
* * *
. . . Adam moved with the deer now, as though he were one of them. When they slipped, shadow-like across the mountain top, he stirred with them. When they grazed, he grazed, eating berries, chewing on stems. When they slept, he slept, dreaming of water and earth tumbling toward him. Except for the paintbrush in his hand, in those hours and days, it seemed to him he may have never been a man. His mind was empty, his naked body fixed on the instinct that that told him to follow the deer, to stay close, to be with them. All around, the world was reconfiguring itself, but here with the deer, he was safe. He belonged.
At one point the deer stopped, mid-flight, in the open meadow. So Adam stopped too. A boom sounded from across the canyon, earth and rock falling in the dark. And there was a great roaring below from the creek that was not the creek. Louder now than before. A wall of water stronger and mightier than the canyon had ever known. Instinct told the deer to halt, identify the danger, then flee up, up, up. Adam knew what they knew and ran with them, one of them. A man might have hesitated, but Adam was no longer a man. He knew which way to run as together they headed west along the incline back into the forest on the hill between the two rivers.
. . .
Thank you for reading.
Big love,
Karen
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A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is a reader-supported weekly meditation on all things wild. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you would like to support my work and these weekly posts, the best way is by becoming a paid subscriber, which gives you access to the full archive of weekly Living Wild Meditations plus all of the Living Wild creativity and writing prompts. If you want to read more, check out Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living.
Karen, Wow!! The way you write about people, animals and Nature together captures the mystery and power and magic of community and communing . I can’t wait to read the rest of this collection! Thank you for such heart felt writing! ♥️♥️